Ivan Illich

Published on Tuesday 10 December 2002 00:00

Born: 24 September, 1926, in Vienna

Died: 2 December, 2002, in Bremen, aged 76

IVAN Illich was a radical and iconoclastic thinker who could deliver an electrifying speech and keep the hairs bristled in the printed versions of his thoughts. He was a man of the evangelical Left who ended up with policy prescriptions of the Right. In the end, however, none of his ideas worked out.

Illich was born in Vienna into a Croat landed family. His father was a Catholic and his mother Jewish. He always attributed this mix to his mental agility. Middle Europeans are adept at languages - they have to be - but Illich was exceptional: fluent in 14 living languages and able to joke in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. His family fled Austria for Italy when the Nazis invaded.

The young Illich decided first to be a research scientist and became eminent in crystallography, but popped up across the University of Florence faculties. In 1943, his reaction to the war was to attend the Gregorian University in Rome to train as a priest. Simultaneously to his theological studies, Salzburg University awarded him a doctorate in history. It is a measure of the sheer intellectual vitality of the man that he was a monsignor at 33, an astonishing progress at the Curia, but doubly so for a man always doubting and challenging authority. Perhaps he could have emerged as a papal candidate, but his convictions and experience took him in other directions.

Assigned by the Vatican to New York, he developed a deep distaste for what he regarded as the mistreatment of Latinos. He felt he had to escape America and found an exit as vice-rector of the University of Puerto Rico. He was soon criticising his bishop for telling Catholics to vote against candidates supporting birth control. Illich saw the hierarchy’s position as pernicious more than absurd and failing all criteria of kindness.

He was not defrocked as a priest, but his lectures and seminars were banned by his Church. This only enhanced his appeal. Slowly, his audiences and readership were far wider than clerical circles. He resigned from the priesthood, but adhered to his vow of celibacy, perhaps only a part of his natural asceticism.

With the publication of Deschooling Society in 1971, Illich became an intellectual making waves for beyond his priestly patch. He argued that all state agencies were inept at providing education. On a visit to Scotland in 1974, he wrote: "My heart is broken thinking of the lives blunted by local authorities. The vast expenditure and waste can be shrugged off but Scotland’s schools seem to impart the opposite of education." He did not mean exam passes. He thought the disease of exams was part of death by bureaucracy. He scoffed at the notion of teacher training and credentials. He said either someone had the gift of teaching or they did not.

Illich loved Scotland, but he learned only late in his visits it was the Summer Scotland he enjoyed. He tried to buy some Hebridean islands to create a community of anarchist-libertarian scholars, but when he first encountered a Scottish winter his sentiments changed. He returned to Mexico, and never saw Mull again.

He laughed at what he saw as the vast trickery imposed on Scotland by her educational establishment. "They keep the Scots shivering through January and February when you should have flown south to the sun. They let you travel abroad only in July and August, when Scotland is at her finest." The reasoning, he argued was plain: "The schools are still locked into the needs of the medieval crop harvest. They have no mechanism to adapt."

Deschooling Society went into 16 editions in English. There is scarcely a language in which it has not been printed. Yet his subversive thinking never became tangible policy. He said even his brightest disciples sold out to the "system".

One politician who was impressed and moved by Illich was the late Sir Keith Joseph, when he was Tory education secretary. Joseph regarded local authorities as the agencies least capable of running anything, let alone schools, but could find no political mechanism to break the near monopoly of municipal provision. Some of Illich’s texts are extraordinarily prescient. He described the diffuse and participatory power of the internet before the technology existed. He imagined it. Illich knew, as every true teacher does, that one-to-one conversations of a few hours mean far more than years of classroom "learning".

If he was in favour of technical advances, he could be equally vehement in opposing others. He regarded television as a force that promotes stupidity as much as the teacher unions and educational bureaucracy. He loathed the effects of cars on urban life.

He descended into crankiness in many of his publications and speeches. Energy and Equity was a clever book but little more than a manifesto for pro-bicycle policies. Tools for Conviviality was a testing inventory of how to live the rewarding and moral life, but it was often little more than vegetarianism with a hint of the mystic.

With Medical Nemesis, he had another hit. His memorial will probably be his promotion of the word "iatrogenesis" - the damage of their patients by the medical professions. Through the centuries, he argued, medics had been killing or maiming with dud techniques. He thought modern clinicians often knew little more than Stone Age shamans. He overstated his case. He overstated it wildly. Yet there are few books better offered in the first year of any nursing or doctoring course. He urged self-diagnosis and self-treatment. This is a phenomenon all GPs now report, as patients surf the net before showing up at the surgery.

As a source of practical policy ideas, Illich will probably do little better in death than he did in life, but some of his writing will endure. His last book, The Vineyard of the Text, is a fine essay on medieval literature.

Illich was last in Scotland in 2000. He was gloomy about the new crop of politicians on The Mound. "You need fewer people to coerce you, not even more" was his curt analysis. As to the MSPs’ myopic dullness: "You can’t blame them. They went to school," he scoffed.

Given that Illich’s life had been one long reaction to the Anchluss, it is a curiosity that he was to die in Bremen, where he so enjoyed teaching. He met his end complimenting his nurses and doctors on their diligence and kindness, having spent most of his creative years criticising them.

Ivan Illich’s central idea that the professions or experts "capture" a market is supported by modern economics, but by routes he never trod. They argue that markets always perform better than bureaucracies. Illich would have shrivelled at being thought to be an ally of those businessmen he saw as oafish or venal golfers.

If only Mrs Thatcher had let her guru, Keith Joseph, apply Illich’s ideas. Selling off the schools as a primary education policy still has a mischievous appeal.